# Jekyll

29 Hacker News commenters recommended Jekyll and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (5 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Simple static site generator that turns Markdown into pages people find secure, easy to host and low-maintenance. Common caveat: complex templates and breaking updates.

## Why people recommend it

- Static pages with no security risk (3 comments): "the best security would be no dynamic code at all, just static pages generated by Jekyll" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616472)) "Super fast load times, zero security issues to worry about, zero dependencies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712539)) "static sites are unhackable, require no maintenance and are free to host" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713574))
- Stable and low-maintenance once set up (4 comments): "It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47735873)) "Jekyll still works flawlessly and is very easy to maintain" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738363)) "I wish all software required this little attention!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47741827))
- Markdown files that deploy anywhere (2 comments): "It is essentially markdown files. You can download your repo, compile the Jekyll to static pages and publish them anywhere." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126650)) "it’s easy to deploy the resulting bundle on various hosting services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473391))
- Good fit for blogs (5 comments): "now I'm on Jekyll and much happier with my blogging experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46490475)) "found Jekyll the most flexible/enjoyable for my use case" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46281680)) "it's dead simple out of the box in Jekyll" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712254))

## What people warn about

- Complex setup and limiting templates (4 comments): "Terrible user experience for someone who just wants to use the generator to generate a website vs. to tinker with it as a hobby." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497009)) "Fiddling with custom DSLs, templates, weird builds and tricks ... was just way too time consuming" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711229)) "Their setup is so much more complicated and limiting than what they had on Wordpress." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710676))
- Slow builds (5 comments): "Jekyll's stack complexity meant CI/CD was hard to implement and it just wasn't that fast." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716110)) "Github Pages ruby-based Jekyll+Liquid, which is unusably slow on iOS without JIT" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280701)) "significantly faster than Jekyll which makes iterating much more pleasant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488347))
- Breaking updates and compatibility problems (5 comments): "it's quite slow, and new versions often introduce breaking changes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898187)) "At some point it stopped being compatible with the latest" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738529)) "dealing with Jekyll updates was sometimes a headache" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489435))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Astro](https://hackerapproved.com/p/astro.md): 174 recommend
- [Hugo static site generator](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hugo.md): 85 recommend
- [Eleventy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/eleventy.md): 22 recommend
- [Zensical](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zensical.md): 17 recommend
- [Zola](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zola.md): 15 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Jekyll", https://hackerapproved.com/p/jekyll/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).